Betraying our soldiers

The miserable bastards.

Not only have Dubya and his war-and-wealth obsessed thugs started an unnecessary war, doing incalculable damage my nation in the eyes of the rest of the civilized world, not only have they LIED outright about the connection to Al Qaeda and whether Hussein's weapons actually exist, not only are they already handing off war-spoils to their business cronies (Halliburton, anyone?), they are screwing over the men and women whose lives they are putting in danger.

They are conducting this war according to how they want it to go, not how it needs to be fought. They are conducting this as a media event, not as a war, and my soldiers are paying for it in blood.

Yes - MY soldiers. That's MY army. Those are MY Marines. Trying to say that if I oppose this moronic war means I'm not "supporting our troops" is coming out as the worst of all the lies and deceptions Prince George has promulgated. You, sir, don't give a FUCK how many of these working-class people you kill. You treat them as you treated them in Viet Nam, where you avoided service (thanks you, Daddy for pulling strings so I could stay home and drink and snort coke!) and left the men without any political pull to go get their asses shot off.

So, as you don't care about them - you only care about looting the wealth of the nation and about being King - I am taking them back from you. They weren't yours to begin with, you opportunistic fuck-up. I am outraged when I listen to Rummy passing the buck for screwing over our soldiers - Tommy Franks! It was Tommy's idea to run the war this way!

You chicken hawks have put my soldiers in an impossible situation. You horribly miscalculated the Iraqis. You have sent too small a force to deal with a guerilla war situation, forcing them to conduct battles in urban areas where civilians are going to be killed. You have left them under-manned in the middle of an incredibly inhospitable environment. You have set them up not for failure but for atrocity.

Of course, now that we are there, we can't leave. Not now. My soldiers have to stay to save your sorry ass. To keep you from looking "weak".

And now the word is you want to bomb Baghdad flat. A city of 5 MILLION people - you want to kill them all. Just bomb it flat if they won't surrender. Oh, now, *that's* a great military and diplomatic policy. Or you want to send the soldiers into the city as it is - just like your Daddy sent Marines into Mogadishu. "Chicken-hawk Down."

Let us hope that the senior military in this country will oppose your stupid, self-interested, ignorant policies. War is conducted on the ground, one bullet at a time, not according to Richard Perle's grand fantasies of how it *should* go.

How many soldier's bodies is the Presidency worth, Dubya?

Ang

False Victories

As could have been predicted by anyone with 2 live brain cells to rub together, the US (and the Brits) are making mincemeat of Saddam.

Does this really mean we have "won"? Hardly.

I was reading a New York Times article in which an Iraqi colonel who has surrendered spoke to the reporter about why he did so and what he thought. He hates Saddam Hussein. But he also hates the US. He names Saddam Hussein an agent of America. Think about it for a minute and it makes sense. Who enabled Hussein to become the over-controlling dictator that he is? In great part the US, but also Britain and other European powers. I suspect that a good number of Iraqis consider it about time that the foreigners cleaned up after themselves.

Hussein will be dead relatively soon. At what cost?

At the cost of another exercise of imperial, kingly power by a president, and done for spurious reasons. Americans appear to have no idea just how badly this administration is shitting on the US Constitution, how casually they encroach on civil liberties, and how callously they are ruining the country's economic future. Hell no, why should we care about such thing when we get to kill towel-heads? Gee-haw, shoot them Injuns! Sorry, the obsession that my average countryman has with murdering what offends him (his neighbors, his wife & children, his dog, people of different cultures and faiths, people who say I don't like you or your values, etc.) just turns my stomach. Might makes for brutality, never for right.

At the cost of any semblance of peace in Iraq. What is there to follow up Hussein? Another puppet government picked and approved by the West? There is no civil society, no rule of law not men, no dedication to Liberal (Locke an sense, not US political slang sense) (not that my average countryman has a fucking *clue* of the difference) social & political values. The government of the Middle East, once you leave Israel or Iran, is that of a military junta vs. an Islamic theocracy. These are the powers that have been vying for political control in these nations (Anybody here know the recent history of Algeria? Mighty instructive.) and, in combination with the religious and ethnic divisions of the region, spell out decades of disaster and internal warfare for Iraq. The Sunni minority who had Western backing and ruled via a military dictator are now going to be tangling with a Shia majority who want the rule of Mullahs. And let's not forget the Kurds - who are hated by the Iraqi Arabs, by the Turks and by the Iranians. What sort of ethnic-cleansing bloodbath is going to happen this time around? Are the US & Britain prepared to defend these people? I look to Afghanistan for the model of Bush "nation building" in action. But the Middle East and increasing portions of the globe will be given more reasons to fear us, distrust us, hate us. Osama bin Laden is sitting somewhere laughing at the good news.

At the cost of the comity of nations. The US has placed itself above the judgment of other nations. We are no longer a Super-power; we are a Hyper-power. And a hypocritical one. All nations are equal but some nations are more equal than others. The world is polarized in a way it has never been before, and we are turned into a crude, brutal imperial power. Some are smug at this thought, thinking that we are unassailable in our might and thus we might as well help ourselves to what the world has. There is a horrific, short-sighted logic to this, I suppose, totally in keeping with people of a maniacal faith who think the world is going to blow up (and they, the "forgiven", will magically ascend to "Heaven") so why not fuck it up and fuck everyone over while we're here?

What will disgust me most will be the smug, self-satisfied back-patting when the big guns and the TV cameras come home, accompanied by an utter disregard for what we have made of ourselves and the world. So damn sure we're right. So, who is next for invasion? Cuba? North Korea? Pakistan? France? Vanuatu?

All so Dubya can "win" the next election.

Ang

Reality Intrudes

My countrymen, particularly those in positions of power over the making of war, are insane. Why? Whywhywhywhywhy? What possible moral or practical advantage can come to our nation (let alone the rest of the world) by this pig-headed obssession with killing Hussein?

Let's get it straight - this war is not about Hussein being evil, or dictatorial, or in league with al Queda (oh, what a fucking joke that claim is!), or harboring some kind of hideous weapons. This is all about the fact that Daddy Bush lost the presidency because he didn't kill the bastard the last time around, and Prince George isn't going to make the same mistake. There is no more or greater reason than that.

Hussein is a ghastly, awful, brutal dictator. But we knew this decades ago when the West was helping him develop chemical and other warfare resources and encouraging him to use it on Iran (Remember that little war?) in order to keep the Islamic Jihad under control. When he gassed Iranians and Kurds, we didn't give a shit. We sent him money, advisors, chemicals, machinery, engineers, etc., etc., etc. But, our attack dog bit us back when he figured he would nab a little oil field to the south. Then we decided to beat the dog into submission. At that time, the military powers that be knew that we would be involved in a long, drawn out ground war to get him out of power, one that would be "unpopular" (and would kill a fuck of a lot of US soldiers) and Bush the elder's rating were so high, no one would beat him in the next election!

Ha.

But we left the attack dog running around in its yard. And Poppy lost the election for one and only one reason - it's the economy, stupid. No one in the US, once the video-game war was "over" (Over? OVER? Ask the thousands of soldiers who had to deal with the aftermath about how "clean" that war was, and whether it is "over". Ask the soldiers left on patrol. Ask the inspectors who played games of cat-and-mouse. No, that war has never ended; it just went into stealth mode, where Joe six-pack and Jack expense-account could ignore it.) gave a shit about a pissant dictator, who was just like all the other pissant dictators the US has built up and torn down over the years. We cared about what really was hurting us, namely, the looting of this nations wealth and future by George H. W. Bush, family & friends. And we voted the bastard out.

Then the war shifted to the domestic arena, and the new enemy became Bill Clinton. Poppy and Sons waged war on Clinton and did their damndest to destroy a very competant president, the best we've had since Nixon. (Didn't think you'd hear me say *that*, did you?). And they stole the election from Gore. Gore beat Duhbya. He won more votes. By a substantial margin. Even in Florida.

So, Clinton and Gore are gone, and a Bush is back. And now we have to deal with the other person who made Poppy lose the White House, Hussein. If we had just killed the fucker the first time around, so the thinking goes, we would have WON the election. So we're going to kill him this time, and then Prince George's next coronation will be secured.

That's what this war is about - the next US presidential elections. It is not about Hussein, al Queda, terrorism or any of that shit. It is about raising popularity levels for Duhbya so high that he will be a shoe-in during the next election, so he and his buddies can turn this nation into Enron.

It is the economy, stupid.

Or, to be more precise, it is the wealth transference. Read any of Paul Krugman's articles in the New York Times and you will realize that Bush cares nothing about economics except how to pilfer every dime he can. His administration is not just negligent about public economic policy and procedures - they are criminal. They want it all for themselves, and fuck the rest of us.

Look at how callously the administration has squandered all of the international good will that came after 9/11. Understand that it is exactly how it is squandering all of the wealth and economic power that they stole from the previous administration. Just as they are turning an economic slump into a recession without a visible end-point, so will they turn a moderate threat into a morasse of incessant dirty warfare, and for the same reason - to keep control of the government so they can rob this nation blind.

The stakes, of course, are very real terrorist attacks using some kind of chemical or nuclear agent, and our nation plunged into a new Great Depression. All at the same time. Let's hear it for the boy!

I do firmly believe that Iraq is better off without Hussein, but not though these means. We'll "win" this time. We'll find and kill Hussein, and butcher the Iraqi army, and there will be a good deal of celebration in the streets of Baghdad. Then will come the arduous task of nation-building, which this administration is incompetant to perform, and which will have no support from the rest of the world because we have acted criminally and unilaterally.

Take a look at Afghanistan if you wish to know the future of Iraq.

Look at the hole in the heart of Wall Street if you wish to know the future of America. Literally and symbolically, that is the future for us now.

Ang